Section-Level Rail Freight Efficiency: An Integral Index and Factor Ranking for the Bukhara–Misken Line, Uzbekistan

Railway efficiency is usually measured for whole networks or companies, while investment and operating decisions are taken for individual sections. This paper develops and tests a section-level method for assessing rail freight efficiency, using the Bukhara–Misken section of Uzbekistan Railways (392 km, single track, opened in 2017 and electrified in 2025) as the case. Twenty partial indicators are grouped into operational, economic, service-quality and socio-environmental blocks, normalised by the min–max method against the section's worst value for 2018–2025 and the national best-practice benchmark, and weighted by the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) with 14 experts. The integral efficiency index rose from 0.406 in 2018 to 0.621 in 2025, moving the section from the "medium" to the "above medium" level, but it remains 9% below the national average (0.682) and 16% below the Bukhara–Qarshi benchmark section (0.741). Data envelopment analysis (DEA) confirmed the ranking of years (Spearman ρ = 0.95). A multiple regression on 28 quarterly observations (R² = 0.912) shows that wagon dwell time at freight stations (β = −0.412) and the empty-running ratio (β = −0.318) have the strongest effect, ahead of freight volume, electronic documentation and section speed, while the real tariff level is not significant. Organisational and technological levers therefore take priority over capital-intensive ones. Under the baseline scenario, the proposed measures raise the index to 0.752 by 2030, with an annual effect of 152.6 billion UZS and a discounted payback period of 3.1 years.